Reviews of Following My Toes

Reviewed by Penny http://loveromancesandmore.com/followingmytoes_p enny.html June 2006 © Love Romances, 2001-2006. All Rights Reserved
Faith Emerson is heart broken when her boyfriend of two years dumps her for her best friend. So when her good friend Carolyn suggests she move to Minneapolis, Faith sees it as a chance for a new start. But things don’t always go as one plans. She is forced to deal with a stripper and phone sex operator room-mate, a jealous ex-girlfriend of a man she hardly knows, although admits she would like to get to know better, a stalker, and a sister that blows into town and invites herself to stay.
Get ready to giggle! Author Ms. Osterkamp has penned a tale that is pure delight and will touch the reader on many emotional levels. Characters are multidimensional and well formed and will worm their way into the reader’s heart. Faith is a high school teacher but when she is unable to find a job teaching takes a temporary job in a coffee shop. This reader couldn’t help but laugh when poor Faith ended up on her tushy after being tripped by a customer from heck who is also a jealous witch, Glenn (yes, Glenn is a girl in this tale). Glenn is one of those characters the reader will love to hate!
Faith also has to come to grips with the betrayal of two very important people in her life. This aspect of the book touched this reader. Ms Osterkamp wrote with realism that you don’t often times find in fictional literature. Kudos to the author for this believable look into a woman scorned who is trying to move on in her life.
FOLLOWING MY TOES is about a young woman who no one believes has psychic ability. When something good is about to happen Faith’s toes itch. Readers won’t need to rely on Faith’s toes to know that FOLLOWING MY TOES is a wonderful read that will be enjoyed by all chick lit, or women’ s fiction lovers out there.

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Reviewed by Jennifer Murray Somerset http://www.bookpleasures.com/Lore2/idx/75/2380/ Reviewers_Bookpleasures_Team/article/Following _My_Toes.html December, 2006

This is a story about a woman, Faith Emerson, who finds herself dumped by her boyfriend of two years for her best friend. Her friend Carolyn suggests that she make a change and move to the “big city”. Faith decides that an adventure is what she needs to shake up her life. Enter a case of clouded perception of personalities, a screwball chain of events that is just farfetched enough to make you believe it could really happen, a psychic ability that Faith feels in her toes, a romance and our main character finding out she can stand on her own, and you have what has become the romance novel of the twenty-first century.

Laurel Osterkamp gives each of her characters, from the main to the peripheral characters that we might only see once, a well-rounded identity. Unfortunately you do not see that much attention to detail in the entire environment of a story all that often.

To me, that just makes the story more “real” and easier to get lost in and what I consider the real joy of a book. Now some of the screwball events were a little too much for me and the oblivion to the world around her that Faith seemed to be in at all times was bit trying to me. As the reader you could see things about to happen that Faith seemed totally oblivious to until she was almost in over her head and she had to be rescued by the object of her love/hate desire. Yet I suppose if you didn’t have that, then you wouldn’t have forward progression of the story.

Osterkamp’s background as a comedy writer is readily apparent with the nice balance between the humor and the serious making this a good choice for a fun beach read. I believe it’s safe to assume that Osterkamp has many more stories to tell and I look forward to seeing her evolution as an author.